Registration request for new variant subtag; Anii, Balanka

[Doug Ewell]

Mats Blakstad <mats dot gbproject at gmail dot com> wrote:

> My collaborators in Benin can accept "balanka" as the subtag. The
> value is not so important, and to use "balanka" could be good as you
> can look at it and see directly which Anii dialect the code is about.

Good. Since nobody has objected to 'balanka' being preferable over
'anibl', I'll send updated paperwork to the list. The earliest this
could be submitted to IANA would be one week after then (Section 3.5).

> Also, they wonder if this subtag can be used later for LibreOffice or
> Ubuntu? They are preparing a spell-checking database that is hunspell-
> compatible. Will this "Balanak" subtag be used for all softwares, or
> only internett? As I only work on a website myself, I'm not sure if
> this register is also used for softwares?

That would be entirely up to the authors or maintainers of LibreOffice
and Ubuntu. BCP 47 is intended not only for web pages (often and wrongly
assumed to be its only use case), but for all types of software, data,
and even non-computerized records where language identification is
important.

Each producer of software or data has to decide whether to embrace BCP
47 fully, whether to go with a partial or broken BCP 47-like solution,
or whether to use a different system such as Linguasphere's or even
invent their own. It would certainly make sense for these open-source
projects to embrace BCP 47 fully, including variants, but we can't
enforce that.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA
http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­